Hi wily; I may have to stay up late enough tonight to go short some RMBS at the open, assuming all the longs aren't there before me.
That yahoo article of last night was way too detailed to be anything other than the complete truth or a complete fraud. I don't know which way to guess, but my engineering instincts say that sticking 36 800MHz transfer lines on a noisy motherboard, and then having each line go to to 25 destinations is a great way to end up with a marginal system. If you don't have enough margins, you just can't test all the possible ways that things can go wrong. Little things like some guy changing a capacitor in your power supply could cause a little extra wiggle somewhere, and your machine breaks.
The problem with marginal systems is that the engineers are always telling you that it is almost working, and that they almost have all the bugs worked out. So management goes ahead with advertising and production, and then gets it in the teeth. Engineers who say it can't be done get ignored, while the ones that say that it can, get management's attention. I've seen this happen so many times, the engineers who promise too much get the go ahead.
I'd like to remind people that Intel had to back off on the specs of the SDRAM so much that the PC-100 spec uses parts that are typically speced to run at 125MHz, rather than just 100MHz. The difference is 25%, and that was the necessary margins. There really is no reason for the technically illiterate to believe that Intel won't have to do the same thing again, and require 1GHz RDRAMs to achieve a working 800MHz system.
I could go into specifics, but it is pointless with the crowd on this thread. The ancient and revered (and somewhat secret) engineering term for someone who (ab)uses technology which he doesn't understand is "dweeb." People who bought this stock without understanding the technical ramifications from the hard-nosed point of view of someone who actually designs memory chips into equipment is definitely making an analysis of a system that they do not understand.
Instead, they are relying on the analyses of others. I
don't care how great a genius someone is in other things. If they haven't been designing world-class memory interfaces, they are very unlikely to have the technical skills required to figure out whether a particular idea is a good engineering tradeoff. Even if they are otherwise a great electronics engineer. How the rest of you can make an investment based on the sales promotional literature of these companies is beyond me. You knew that they were late on the market, and that the memory makers hate the stuff, what more did you need to know? Disasters like this happens all the time in industry, it's just that most of the time the doomed players don't succeed in selling huge gobs of over priced stock to the public. This one is going to go down in the history books, in my opinion.
Or who knows? The article could be well written fake. Maybe all those engineers will actually get it all to run. You guys could end up with RMBS at $500 per share in a few years, in the mean time, you'd better hold on to your certs.
-- Carl |
